Top marks for Synge Street scientists

JUST as the best ideas are sometimes the simplest, the most complicated can also have their uses as proven by the winners of the 48th BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition.

Taking top honours for their ‘Simulation accuracy in the gravitational many-body problem’, the project of Synge Street CBS Leaving Certificate students Eric Doyle and Mark Kelly could leave you wondering if science is just too darn hard for general consumption.

Their project, which, to the uninitiated, sounds like something thrown up in Arithmancy — the branch of magic concerned with the magical properties of numbers at Hogwarths School of Witchcraft and Wizardry — does, according to Mark, have a more practical application: “If you want to send a satellite to the other side of space you don’t have exact formulas for this so you use an algorithm to do so.”